Linguistic diversity India's biggest strength: BRS' KTR questions Centre's Hindi push

Hyderabad, Sep 12 (IANS) Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) Working President, KT Rama Rao on Thursday questioned Union Home Minister Amit Shah over his Hindi push and warned that language chauvinism would be India’s bane.

“Why exactly do we need increased Hindi acceptance,” Rama Rao asked on X while reacting to the Home Minister’s statement.

“Why not increased promotion of Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati etc? Hindi is one among the 22 official languages of India. Why only push Hindi?,” asked KTR, as the former minister is popularly known.

“Linguistic diversity is one of the biggest strengths of India and language chauvinism will be our bane,” said the BRS leader.

He was reacting to the Union Home Minister’s statement that there was a need to increase the acceptance of Hindi in the country without competing with any other Indian language.

HM Shah had stated this on Monday while addressing the newly-constituted Parliamentary Committee on Official Language after being re-elected as its chairperson.

HM Shah had said that Hindi was now in a way associated with employment and technology, and the government of India was also making special efforts to integrate all the new-age technologies with Hindi.

This is not the first time that KTR had found fault with the Centre for its Hindi push.

In 2022, he had written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi strongly opposing the move to make Hindi a medium of instruction in all technical and non-technical educational institutions including central universities.

He had termed as unconstitutional, the recommendation of a Parliamentary Committee on Official Language headed by HM Shah that Hindi be made the medium of instruction in technical and non-technical educational institutes.

KTR, in his letter to the Prime Minister, had detailed the far-reaching disastrous impact of the unconstitutional recommendation on the future of current and coming generations, the division it could draw between various parts of India, and other crucial aspects.

Drawing focus on how indirect imposition of Hindi was currently ruining lives of crores of youngsters, KTR said that students who pursue education in regional languages are losing out on central government job opportunities as questions in qualifying tests for the central jobs are in Hindi and English.